I took college courses that began to try to deal with the issues presented by science and technology. We explored the concept that there is absolutely such a thing as "dangerous knowledge" in that despite what would appear to be the benign nature of the existence of the knowledge mankind would perhaps not be able to refrain from using it for great evil or possibly even the destruction of mankind.
We explored things like what might have happened if the Japanese hadn't surrendered? Would we have kept dropping nuclear bombs? If we did what then? How much could that have encouraged/discouraged use by other nations in conflicts? There were things we explored in biology, psychology etc. as well. Our profs told us up front at the beginning of the class that there were no quizzes or tests. The only thing required of us would be at the end of the semester to write a paper, length to be optional, of what we thought of what we experienced by having taken the course and what we felt we had learned and to take with us. No grade just simply a pass/fail based on a paper that could be as short as a sentence or so.
I was heartened that most of the people in the class actually did put in serious reflection and wrote multi-page papers explaining their answers to these questions and why they felt that way or how they came to those conclusions. Almost universally the papers identified the need for people in STEM fields to always consider the human impacts of what people in STEM professions do and to always consider as many scenarios as possible on all sides the good and the bad of people in society making use of this "knowledge" we were developing.
I look now at AI as possibly the most dangerous thing we have done since the nuclear bomb. AI and deep fake capability has the capacity to erase that which is true, replace it with the false while claiming to be the truth and then reinforce that claim by dominating to the point of exclusion all information/communication to the contrary and means/mediums. It is vital to ask questions and be wary of those who assure us it is "only a tool".
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